Posted on 04/01/2008 7:00:13 PM PDT by Bloody Sam Roberts
SEATTLE (AP) — The format Microsoft Corp.'s Office 2007 programs use to save documents was approved as an international standard Tuesday, a step the company touted as proof it is willing to make once-proprietary technology work openly with competing programs.
But the International Standards Organization vote didn't quiet some opponents, who argued that the Office Open XML standard still locks out competitors and gives Microsoft customers no choice but to keep buying its programs forever.
The decision was made public on the Web site of a European standards organization, Ecma International, on Tuesday. ISO is expected to formally announce the vote Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.google.com ...
01110000011010010110111001100111
01110000011011110110111001100111
> 01110000011011110110111001100111
01110100011010000110100101110011
0111001101110101011000110110101101110011
hey, you guys...go 127.0.0.1. !
0101100101100101011000010110100000101100001000000110100101110100001000000110010001101111011001010111001100100000001011100010111000101110
0100001001101001011011000110110000100000010001110110000101110100011001010111001100100000011011010110000101111001001000000110001001100101
011101000110100001100101001000000110000101101110011101000110100100101101011000110110100001110010011010010111001101110100
Huge, piping-hot bowl of fraud.
Yes, indeed it does.
Jeez, doesn’t anyone use spell check any more?
155 157 162 145 040 154 151 153 145 154 171 040 150 145 040 151 163 040 152 165 163 164 040 141
154 145 146 164 151 163 164 040 156 145 162 144 040 167 150 157 040 164 150 151 156 153 163
150 145 040 143 141 156 040 162 165 154 145 040 164 150 145 040 167 157 162 154 144
(apologies for the way-delayed response. dinner ran really late...)
"We don't need no steenking spell check!"
(That is:)
127 145 040 144 157 156 047 164 040 156 145 145 144 040 156 157 040
163 164 145 145 156 153 151 156 147 040 163 160 145 154 154 040 143 150 145 143 153 041
I see your octal and raise you a hex!
(That is:)
492073656520796F7572206F6374616C20616E6420726169736520796F7520612068657800
And I say that very affectionately - I'm working to be one myself!! :o)
Looking at your profile and then seeing your tagline I get the impression that you’ve become a heck of a human being during your journey.
:o) A work in progress....(aren’t we all?) and lots of work to do!
I was our company's representative to a standards committee for a number of years. Most standards start out as something that was developed in house by one company or a group of companies. Microsoft submitting their file format to become a standard doesn't represent something that hasn't been done time and time again in the past and won't be done time and time again in the future.
Companies take something they created, create a working group among a standards body, and then open up what they have done to others.
The vast majority of letter ballot votes are going to be fore or against, without comments. When a letter ballot takes place the work on the standard has already been done in a working group, and most technical issues should have been raised and addressed in that working group.
Technical comments on a letter ballot are typically done by people who couldn't be bothered to participate in the working group. Many of the comments are usually valid, others are worthless, occasionally some are put forth by people with opposing interests that are just trying to prevent the process from moving forward.
From what I have read the main objections were related to Microsoft including all of it's "proprietary" features in the standard. Well the whole point of a company opening up their own work to the standards process is to gain a broader market by having what was their proprietary features adopted by others.
People complained that some of the features were not covered in enough detail so that another company could implement them. This is a file format, not a tutorial on how to implement certain features. If the information is there to record the aspects of that feature, implementation is up to the company that implements it. It allows compatibility to be developed, but it doesn't need to show how to implement features.
The other argument seemed to be that there was already an existing document format that was standardized.
That's fine. However, that format may not have suited everyone's needs, and there is nothing wrong with competing standards. Companies are capable of choosing which standard suits their needs best.
If other companies don't want to use the standard that Microsoft basically put forth, they are free to not use it. However, they shouldn't try and stop Microsoft from standardizing their format unless there were serious technical issues with how the format was described in the standards document. Standards groups aren't supposed to be places where companies try and restrain other companies from their own standards efforts.
If this process for ISO approval of OOXML had progressed according to what you have written, then there would be no problem or concerns.
Please go to the link I placed in reply #1 and read that article. Clearly, Microsoft has corrupted the process as you outline it and is worthy of the scorn and derision they are receiving if the facts are as presented.
I read that article and quite a few others as well.
The evil Microsoft undermined the standards process by stacking the committee with business partners.
What a load of crap.
Do you really think it was better to have the V1 committee made of of 7 companies, led by Sun pushing their Open Document Format, who's products represented a tiny portion of people using office applications?
The Open Document Format was standardized by a relatively small group of anti-Microsoft companies. They created a standard that suited their purposes, but didn't encompass all the features that Microsoft has in their office suite, which has an overwhelming share of the market.
That's a horrible way to create a standard, but since Microsoft and other companies to whom office productivity suites didn't choose to participate in the standards process, they didn't have much room to complain that the standard didn't suit their needs.
After the fact, Microsoft decided that having a standardized office format was something they needed. So they released what had been their proprietary format to standardization.
Not surprisingly, the small group of companies that had created the Open Document Format fought them. They created ODF and were using the fact that it was a standard and Microsoft's format was not to try and chip away at Microsoft's market share. If Microsoft's format becomes standardized, ODF loses a lot of it's appeal.
Once Microsoft decided to standardize their format, being part of the standardization process became important to a lot of companies who before had considered Microsoft to be the informal standard, despite it being a closed format.
So participation by companies in the standards group tripled.
But apparenly according to all the advocates of openness, more isn't better, it's worse. When more companies started participating. Sun, IBM, Red Hat, and the others that were using the standards body to push their own agenda lost control of the process.
As an ISO standard, OOXML will be maintained and modified by the standards group, not by Microsoft. It is an Open Standard.
Of course a representative of the OpenDocument Format Alliance makes vague claims that the standard isn't completely open and might possibly make it possible for Microsoft to sue companies that try and maintain compatibility over Copyright violations.
There are of course the same people that complain that the claims that using open source code in your own software might open you up to copyright claims if someone put copyrighted code into open source code, are completely overblown.
Microsoft can't maintain copyright claims on things they released to the standards group. Other companies may not be able to identically copy how Microsoft implements things, but the purpose of a standard it to allow compatibility, not hand over all the work a company did implementing their products.
The problem many of these open source groups have with that is that they are generally opposed to ownership of intellectual property, as well as capitalism for that matter.
The open source community has a large faction that are basically communists and believe in communal property rights not individual property rights.
I'm sure a great many posters on Slashdot will be very distressed that Microsoft has been able to undermine the marketing ploy of Microsoft's adversaries.
However, this will make it so those of us that generally use Microsoft Office at work, and Open Office at home with have better file compatibility in the future. Open Office will be able to become a better product in that it suits the needs of it's users better.
It becomes harder for the opponents of Microsoft to say government offices must replace Microsoft Office with Open Office because it has an open file format, but that doesn't harm consumers.
If Open Office can get better compatibility, why would companies still choose MS Office? Microsoft has dumped billions of dollars into developing and improving Office over the years. It's not perfect, but for most companies, it probably is the best product out there, and when you're spending lots of money per hour on labor, you don't need to have the software save workers much time, before Office pays for itself.
A lot of good information to be sure. You are well versed in the process. Far more so than I. That is clear.
However, my objection to the whole thing falls at a point way before anything you wrote is of any consequence. It is not a question of motivation but of tactics.
The following information is what I find disturbing and if true cannot be what you would call a normal part of the process or a 'load of crap'. It can't be. Furthermore, I don't believe that this employee did so without MS knowledge.
"Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard."
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